BBMRI-ERIC is a new research infrastructure for European biobanks with its headquarters in Graz. Franz Zuckriegl and Ben Hemmens interviewed the Director General, Prof. Jan-Eric Litton, in the offices at the new Med Campus Graz.

“Stratified medicine is already working and will be important in the near future. Personalized medicine is many years in the future,” says Prof. Jan-Eric Litton, Director General of BBMRI-ERIC. He cites a practical example: “Sometimes a pharma firm develops a new drug and then has to withdraw it shortly after going to market because a subgroup of patients has an adverse reaction. If you can identify that subgroup and filter them out, the drug can be used for the others.”

The chances of accurately identifying subgroups of patients increase with the size of the datasets. Especially when researchers are searching for statistical patterns made up of multiple parameters, meaningful conclusions are only possible on the basis of large numbers of cases. Especially research on disease prevention depends on statistical analysis of big numbers and, in order to filter out region-specific factors, on international data collections. All in all, this leads to a need for a framework in which the European biobanks can cooperate – and that is what BBMRI-ERIC aims to provide.